A Field Trip

Yesterday, our home school group took a little field trip to radio station WYPR 88.1. After hearing the trip was ideally for children six and up, I asked a friend if she wanted to swap kids: I'd take her two older ones with my boys and she'd take my little princess for the afternoon. I allowed more time than necessary to find suitable parallel parking on Charles Street and so I found myself feeding the meter a whole thirty minutes before our tour was to begin. We only had a two block walk to the station and even though I insisted on taking our time, we were still unfashionably early. We entered the building, waited a bit in the lobby and then when I noticed the children getting antsy, (in about 4 minutes) I decided to take them for a march around the block. It wasn't until we entered the lobby the second time (now accompanied with several other moms and kids) that I realized I had been to this radio station before. Two years ago my friend, Gordon, had asked me to help him move some of his paintings from his studio space to WYPR for a little exhibit he was having there. We schlepped a good many cumbersome paintings up and down those steps, but I didn't see much of the inner workings of the radio station at that time.

This time however, we got to see the important computers that almost run the station themselves, the recording booths, the producer's booths, the music archives, the "bat cave" and the news room. Our tour was guided by none other than Andy Bienstock and I even saw Baltimore's own Marc Steiner! He was getting ready to go on air and I smiled broadly as I walked right past him, but was too shy to say, "I love your show." I'm sure he gets that a lot anyway. The grand finale of the trip was a lunch provided by The Evergreen complements of our hosts up in the conference room. I had a very delicious curry chicken green salad, but also got a sampling of D's tuna and all I can say is, "Yum, what a great trip." Even the children enjoyed it.

[side note: I also happened to notice on the way out, that the building directly across the street was where I took some of my nanny courses when enrolled at Lovegrove School for Nannies my first year after high school graduation. I had forgotten that little detail of my life until this trip.]